Valentine Activity Round-Up

We are having a nice quiet week: hurray for no appointments or meetings! Which means we've been spending some spare time working on fun Valentine crafts.

We counted hearts, from Chasing Cheerios.

We made hanging heart garlands, from Skip to My Lou. Our version was a little simpler. Using the method described here, I folded scraps of Valentine colored paper in half, drew half a heart, and the Ant Bug cut them out. Then we just attached them to pink yarn with string and taped them from our ceiling.

We made paper hugs, from No Time for Flashcards (pictured above). This activity was really fun. The Ant Bug added a hat and a skirt and legs to her hug. The Sweet Bee wanted to do another and contented herself with large dollops of glue and googly eyes.
We got 20 valentines ready for a preschool class. Nothing too creative here, we just bought a box from the store, but the Ant Bug did match up stickers and got lots of practice writing her name.
We made hearts with glitter and glue, from No Time for Flashcards (pictured above). My girls loved this activity and stayed crafting for nearly an hour, but I have to warn you: glitter is not for the faint of heart. I gave the girls each a cookie tray for holding their paper to use to help contain the glitter, but we still ended up with glitter everywhere. Anyone have any tips for making glitter projects less messy?!
The heart cookie cutters were fine to start with, but we moved quickly to painting glue with a cotton swab, and eventually to just squeezing the glue directly onto the page and dumping glitter.
We raided our recycle paper drawer and they created a lot of masterpieces.Thankfully, the Ant Bug was very eager to use the vacuum to help me clean up!

We bought some heart shaped message candies.
I plan to use these a few different ways:
Counting, from Ramblings of a Crazy Woman.
Heart Patterns, from Teach Mama.
Tic Tac Toe Hearts, from Alpha Mom.
Love Letters, from Love Actually.

We plan to make our traditional sugar cookies and decorate them with friends on Friday.

Here are a few more we'll squeeze in if we get the chance:
Dance streamers, from Chasing Cheerios (for a Fun Friday Family Night).
Valentine Treasure Hunt, from Serving Pink Lemonade and also Teach Mama.
Heart Family, from Cakies.
Heart shaped animals, from Make and Takes.
Heart shaped pizza, from No Time for Flashcards.